“I’ll have the ham steak, mashed and slaw,” I said.
She nodded, scribbled her notes, tore off the page, slapped it down on the counter and yelled the order to the cook in the back. She grabbed a pitcher of iced tea and dashed off to refill the glasses of some of the other patrons.
I sipped my sweet tea and looked around. Walt’s had obviously been around for a few years. The ceiling in the tall, narrow room was covered with panels of tin pressed into a flowery design. The counter with stools would have dated the place some, but the walls above the row of tables were covered in old black and white photos. There were high school football teams, Little League baseball teams, a framed page from a newspaper—the Blythe Herald—with a huge screaming headline splashed across the front: “Tornado Hits Town.” Lace curtains draped on a rod covered the front windows at about waist height, allowing the sunlight from outside to come in, and allowing the patrons of Walt’s to look outside and see what was going on in the courthouse square. Which, at the moment, was exactly nothing.
“So what brings y’all to Blythe?” the waitress, who had snuck up on me and was refilling my glass of tea reduced by all of one sip, was asking.
“Passing through on my way up to Augusta,” I said.
“You Army?” she asked, looking doubtfully at my longish hair.
“Nope,” I said.
“Nuclear?” She was referring to the Savannah River Plant, where they had been making, working with and storing nuclear materials since DuPont built the first reactor in the early 1950s. All I knew about the massive and highly secretive site along the Savannah River was that it was the second-largest employer in the greater Augusta area, after the Army’s Fort Gordon.
“Nope,” I said. “Going up for the golf tournament next week.”
“Ah,” she said, and cast her eyes somewhat nervously back towards the kitchen. “You might not want to mention that if Walt comes out.”
“He doesn’t like golf?” I said, smiling.
“Naw,” she said. “His nephew was murdered a few days ago. They found his body on the golf course. He’d been shot.”
“I heard about that,” I said, noncommittally.
She pushed her hair back and nodded. “Well, nobody in the family has been able to find out anything,” she said, shaking her head. “The po-leece has clammed up tighter than a tick. And that damn club ain’t sayin’ nothing. Walt and his sister—Johnny’s mother-- is all tore up. They buried him Sunday.”
“And no idea who did it or why?” I asked innocently.
“You a cop?” a rough voice rasped.
The waitress and I both looked up, surprised. A large man with a huge, red, bald head was standing there, holding an immense plate of food in his hand. It looked like a ham steak cut from a five-foot-long pig. This was apparently Walt, with an apron strung across his massive chest, covering a tee shirt. His jowly face seemed to melt necklessly into his torso. I would have bet the farm that he’d played the interior line for Blythe High School, and maybe for Clemson or the USC Gamecocks after that. His arms were also beefy, but compared to that chest, they looked almost puny holding my lunch.
He put the plate down in front of me and fixed me with an unfriendly stare.
“No, sir, I am not,” I said carefully, picking up my napkin-wrapped silverware. “I am a reporter, a sports writer, on my way to cover the Masters next week.”
He continued to stare at me, his beady little eyes peering out from beneath his massive, sweaty forehead. After the eyebrows, there wasn’t another hair in view on the man, if you didn’t count a few strays peeking out from his ears.
“Reporter, huh.” It was a statement, not a question, and it didn’t sound like he was a fan of the Fourth Estate. But then, who is these days?
“Yes sir,” I said politely. I was trying as hard as I could to maintain an even, pleasant tone of voice with Walt. He was big, he looked mad and I’ll bet he had a sharp cleaver back there somewhere. “This nice young lady was telling me about your nephew,” I continued, nodding at the waitress, who was looking at me with what I assumed was a warning not to go where I was heading. “I am sure sorry for your loss. We were just talking about the lack of information forthcoming from the police about the crime.”
His thick eyebrows twitched up and down a few times while he digested that.
“They have clammed up on me,” he said, finally. “Somebody has put the kibosh on the thing.”
“Why?” I asked, genuinely curious.
He leaned against the counter and crossed his arms. “Damned if I know,” he said. “Johnny was a good kid. He worked hard, kept his nose clean. He was one of them accountant types…quiet, neat, everything in order. He went to church on Sundays, came home a lot to visit his Mom. Handled my books every year and we never had a problem. Why the Good Lord saw fit for him to have this end … “
His eyes filled with tears, which he fought back. The waitress put a comforting hand on his arm.
“Maybe the cops are working on an angle and don’t want anything to get out in public before they make their move,” I suggested. I tucked into my lunch and was shoveling it in as fast as I could while we talked.
Walt shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “Someone up top has said to bury it, and it is buried,” he said. “The cop I know up there in Augusta made a few calls, talked to some of them in the homicide division. They tole him to forget about it. The lid was officially clamped on.”
“By who?” I wondered.
“That, sir, I don’t know and would like to find out,” Walt said, his jaw quivering in anger. “I gotta figure it’s those damn high-falutin’ golf types at that golf club. Ever’one knows that when they snap their fingers, everyone in the damn city jumps.”
“But I thought Johnny didn’t have anything to do with Augusta National,” I said.
“Far as anyone knows, he didn’t,” Walt said. “But that ain’t very far.”
I finished up my lunch, drank the last of my tea. The waitress poured my glass full again. No one who dines out in the Deep South is ever in danger of dehydration. I figure it must be a state law that every restaurant customer must float out the door filled with about a gallon of tea.
“I tell you what,” I said. “I’ll ask around some. If I learn anything, I’ll let you know.”
Walt’s eyes filled again and he looked away for a moment. Then he grabbed a spare order pad from the counter and scribbled something on it. He ripped it off the pad and handed it to me. “My numbers, here and home,” he said. “Any time, day or night. Name’s Walt, Walt Cromwell.”
I nodded, pulled out my wallet and tucked the paper away.
“What do I owe ya?” I asked. “It was damn good.”
Walt waved his hand. “It’s on the house, young feller,” he said.
I protested. “I can’t guarantee I’ll find out anything,” I said.
Walt was firm. “You just do the best you can,” he said. “That’s all the Lord asks of any of us.”
I shook his hand, and the waitress’, went out through the tinkling door, and got in my car. Quite the coincidence, showing up for lunch here in little Blythe and running into the family of the victim of the incident in Augusta. But like they say on the golf course, if you can’t be good, might as well be lucky.
Chapter Four
Augusta, Georgia, is a funny little town. It was laid out originally by the same General James Edward Oglethorpe who gave Savannah its distinctive gridwork of streets and intersections of leafy green parks. Oglethorpe obviously expended every ounce of charm he had on Savannah, because when he got to Augusta, some 200 miles up the Savannah River, he had nothing left.
Perhaps form does follow function and where Savannah was a commercial interchange, where goods came and went from the seaport and the merchants and the lawyers needed elegant, wrought-iron-bedecked, fanciful homes and offices and churches, Augusta was always a workingman’s town, two-fisted, no-nonsense, down and
dirty. The Savannah River is shallow and shoaled at Augusta, and that fast-moving water was harnessed to run the cotton gins and mills that gave the town its reason for being. Instead of clipper ships from London, Augusta was the destination for cartloads of Georgia cotton, driven by mule team and redneck to the ugly brick mills along the river and canals. Rather than elegant salons, downtown Augusta was a beer-and-a-shot kind of town, filled with bars, gambling dens and whores. Iniquity City. Rednecks just wanna have fun.
It’s also a town that has always had something of a chip on its collective shoulder. While Augusta was busy churning out the raw goods, Atlanta became the South’s financial crossroads and Savannah the South’s premiere party town. Even in the Civil War, after Sherman finally conquered and burned Atlanta—giving that city victim’s bragging rights for eternity—everyone in Augusta expected that they were next on the General’s hit list. The town, after all, had converted some of its mills into powder works to make ammunition for the Rebel army. But no. Sherman merely feinted in Augusta’s direction and then cut his broad swatch south and east through Georgia, before arriving at the gates of Savannah, which quickly rolled over and surrendered, thus preserving for future generations the on-going cocktail party of life in that elegant town.
And while the rebuilt Atlanta prospered and Savannah stayed pretty much the same—the two sides of the Southern miracle coin—Augusta merely faded into the background. It had a brief Renaissance as a winter destination for the rich and powerful during the Gilded Age, but as the railroads pushed deeper and deeper into Florida, which was warmer and had beaches, Augusta’s fame and fortunes waned again. Many suspect the reason why Bob Jones and Clifford Roberts selected Augusta as the site for their golf club was that it was such a quiet backwater podunky kind of place that Jones would be able to visit and play there in relative peace.
But that’s not to say there were no pretty places in Augusta. Up on The Hill, a neighborhood also known as Summerville, there are several blocks of mansions, many with nice views across downtown and the river. I made my way through the city and up into this district, where Brett Jacoby had booked a room for me in a quiet bed and breakfast inn. After a few missed turns and consultations with my map, I finally found the Olde Magnolia Inn, a gothic-looking Victorian home with a turreted tower and a long, winding drive shaded by the eponymous tree. I drove around to the back where there was a crushed-stone parking area next to a gently sloping, shady lawn. Groupings of chairs dotted the lawn, and a large porch wrapped around the entire back of the house.
It was a far nicer place than the one I had booked for next week, during the tournament. Like most other members of the press, I was scheduled to stay in either the Comfort Inn or the Motel 6 over on Washington Road, at the intersection of Interstate 20, one of those deliberately ugly interfaces filled with strip shopping malls, gas stations, fast-food joints and motels. Lots and lots of motels which try to hang on to negligible business for 51 weeks a year just so they can jack the rates up four or five hundred percent during Masters week and make their yearly numbers. The rest of the year, they’d be lucky to get $75 a night. The Boston Journal and other newspapers across America, not to mention the legions of golf fans who invade Augusta every April, paid $295 a night for the same room. Ain’t capitalism grand?
I don’t know what the Olde Magnolia charged, because Augusta National had picked up my tab, at least until Sunday. A pleasant elderly woman checked me in, bade me welcome and showed me upstairs to the Stonewall Jackson Suite, which featured a four-poster bed, chintz wallpaper, heavy mahogany wardrobe and dresser, and a claw-foot bathtub in the bath. There was a cut-glass beaker of sherry on the dresser for my complimentary nightcap, and she said there’d be fresh-baked cookies left outside in the hall in case anyone got the munchies at midnight. Breakfast from seven to nine and did I require anything special?
I thanked her kindly in my best faux-Southern manner and unpacked a bit before placing a call to Jacoby. He said he’d meet me for breakfast at eight, and did I need some recommendations for dinner? I thanked him very kindly, starting to feel queasy at all this unnatural politeness, but said I knew some folks in town I could call.
I flipped through my book and found the number for Connaught Thackery IV. I had met the Conn Man several Masters ago at, best as I could recall, the Aussie party. Every year, the Australians in town for the Masters get together and throw a little “barbie” at one of the rental homes they take for the week. Invited guests include all the Australian Golf Union bigwigs, assorted friends and magnates, and they fly in a planeload of Fosters lager for the event which always attracts the A-list of visiting celebrities, hot babes and residents of Augusta who haven’t rented out their homes and fled town.
Conn was one of those unfortunate Southerners who had been tagged with two last names in what was, I thought, one of the stranger traditions of Dixie. But he had overcome this infliction by embracing the Southern aristocracy, where strange names are both common and accepted. He had coasted through the University of Georgia, managed to get a law degree and come back to Augusta. He didn’t have to work too hard—the family trust fund, run by savvy gnomes over in Atlanta, provided a nice independent income—but he took on cases that interested him, which ran the gamut from high-society divorce cases to First Amendment challenges to the Augusta Chronicle to civil rights cases for the working poor of “The Terry,” or The Territory as Augusta’s downtown black neighborhood was known. As a result, he knew just about everybody in town, one way or another, and knew their secrets.
We had become friendly over several Fosters, while some Aussie band called the “Dreadful Dingos” thumped in the background, and we had spent most of the evening chatting up two vapid sheilas from Adelaide. We promised them a starring role in the next Rigid Tools catalog, but they didn’t know what that meant and eventually disappeared into the night. But we had enjoyed ourselves anyway.
Conn, as always, was happy to hear from me.
“Hacker!” he said when I got him on the phone. “You’re in town? Did you get the dates wrong again? The damn tournament doesn’t start until next week!”
I laughed and told him I was in town a little early to do some advance work. He asked where I was and whistled when I told him about the Olde Magnolia.
“Damn, son, you’re moving up in the world,” he said. “That place is one of the National’s stash houses. It’ll be filled with fancy pants. That’s where they put all the international golf officials. My, my. Remember to keep that pinkie in the air.”
I asked if he was free for dinner and we agreed to meet at a rib joint downtown by the Riverwalk.
Evening plans made, I took a nap in my fancy chintz bedroom. Whether or not my pinkie was suitably raised, I could not say.
Chapter Five
A soft rain had begun to fall and the air was chilly as I drove down off The Hill and found my way down to the Riverwalk, an area of former cotton warehouses and brick factories that had been gentrified and converted with your tax dollars into art museums, shops, uninspiring views of the murky Savannah River and a bedraggled South Carolina on the far shore. I suppose I should give the city some credit for the effort, but in the cold spring rain, downtown Augusta—Riverwalk or no Riverwalk—was dreary and depressing.
Inside, Beamie’s on the River wasn’t much better. Open, bricky, with a big bar in the center of the room, Beamie’s was pretty dead. I didn’t see Conn anywhere, so I took a seat at the bar, ordered a Scotch and ate some stale peanuts while watching the latest news from ESPN. It was all about steroids in baseball and the arrest of some NBA star.
I was halfway through my Scotch when the Conn Man walked in, shaking the rain off his jacket. He was tall, about 50 years old, with salt-and-pepper hair all aflop. But he was obviously in good shape, trim and strong-looking. He was wearing a casual long-sleeved shirt, neatly pressed khakis, and polished loafers. He looked the very part of a Southern aristocrat. I watched him work the room as he made his way up
to the bar. He air-kissed the hostess, shook hands with a couple in a front booth, hugged two other waitresses who saw him and came running up, and high-fived the bartender before he finally turned to me.
“You running for mayor?” I asked as we shook hands.
“Got a few too many skeletons in the closet for public service,” Conn chortled. The bartender set a drink down in front of him and gave him the thumb-shoot sign. Conn shot him back. “Besides, who wants the responsibility of running this dog-ass old town?”
We spent a jolly half-hour or so catching up with each other. He was aghast to learn I had a serious Significant Other; I was happy to hear that he hadn’t changed much. His father had died and left him another small pot of cash, and he had recently concluded, successfully, a big divorce case for a client.
“So you’re basically rolling in it,” I concluded.
“It’s not the money, Hacker,” he said, looking at me seriously. “It’s the fun the money will buy.”
“So you’re having tons o’ fun?”
He grinned at me. “Tryin’ to.”
We moved over to a booth with a view of the gray river sliding slowly past and ordered some steaks and a bowl of the restaurant’s prized seafood gumbo.
“So what are you doing here?” he asked as we tucked into our dinner.
I explained that Brett Jacoby had asked me to come up a few days early and help him with something that had to do with the murder that had been discovered at Augusta National the previous week. “We’re having breakfast in the morning,” I told him. “So I don’t really know what he wants me to do, specifically.”
Conn’s face turned dark, and he frowned.
“That’s a bad business,” he said, shaking his head. “Watch your back.”
“What do you know about it?” I wondered. “And how, exactly, is Augusta National involved?”
He fished the last of his gumbo from his bowl before answering.
“Rule Number One in Augusta,” he said, raising his forefinger like a schoolteacher, “Is that the National is always involved. Even when they say they’re not involved, that means they’re involved but they just don’t want anyone to know it. There is no separating the golf club from anything that happens in this town. Anything.” He wagged that finger for emphasis.
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